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Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.

Naturally, companies are rushing to keep you safe from plastic which can be detected in everything. If you want to detect it in your home and annoy your family talking about how much virtual cancer you want to avoid, A McGill team fired up the 3-D printer and made the hollow-laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (HoLDI-MS) test platform.

That's right, a plastic detector made from...plastic.

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Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination in hiring, even one deemed positive. And they never considered it may have instead been done at all due to pressure from the previous administration.

The backlash was entirely predictable, but in both cases it was on the fringes. For no benefit, corporate CEOs were ignoring the 'stay out of it unless your customers are dominated by it' mantra.

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Some psychologists believe our brains and bodies don’t just understand music, we become it. We physically resonate with it. They call their belief Neural Resonance Theory (NRT). 

They use Theory is in the name, but it is not a theory like gravity or evolution, the proper name means it is more like String Theory. An idea that needs scientific rigor to be shown true. 

NRT maintains that rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain’s natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony.

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Nature is out to kill everything, it is the circle of life, and that is why replanting rainforest without including some termites is counter-intuitively bad, finds a new paper.

The balance of nature doesn't exist and believing that plant diversity alone will work is in defiance of how ecosystems work. That may mean introducing termites. There is a certainly NIMBYism that will occur, just like wealthy elites who oppose nuclear energy and claim wind power is viable hire a phalanx of lawyers to block wind projects near their homes. A company or agency spending money on new trees isn't going to like giving those over to termites either. It would require convincing.

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A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM10, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down 400%, to 2.5. Suddenly air quality maps could be orange and red again, even though the air is cleaner in wealthier countries than it has been since the 1980s.

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Early in 2020, the President of the United States said America should cut travel from China due to COVID-19 concerns. This was dismissed as xenophobia by states like New York and California, because the World Health Organisation had not declared it a pandemic.(1)

In Europe, 18 countries knew better than to wait for WHO to ignore claims from China that it was not a pandemic and closed their borders.

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In a new study, researchers found that the polyphenol fisetin helps protect blood vessels from hardening, which is a common problem in older adults and people with kidney disease. 

If eventually validated in human trials, it might mean it could prevent vascular calcification and reduce cardiovascular damage caused by aging and chronic kidney disease. Fisetin is in the flavonols family and is found naturally in fruits and vegetables but is also sold as an unvalidated supplement outside FDA testing.


Created with Discovery Studio Visualizer.

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With retaliatory tariffs against the EU and countries like China and Brazil, there has been concern about how much medical commerce originates from overseas.

It certainly does, and safety has long been an overlooked concern. Organic food has gotten a free pass, but that is just a USDA marketing gimmick so if 25% of it is fraudulent, no one is harmed, but medicines and devices can risk lives. American companies are forced to undergo 12,000 surprise inspections to insure safety but countries exporting to the US have enjoyed a double-standard. They demanded and got only 3,000 scheduled inspections.

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No doctor tells patients to smoke cigarettes "in moderation", they are a known carcinogen and not smoking cigarettes is one of the top three ways to prevent lifestyle diseases. Yet culture has been grabbed by twin pincers when it comes to alcohol. American women are told if they have a glass of wine their child may get fetal alcohol syndrome while everyone else will be fine with alcohol in moderation.(1)

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Albert Einstein has been proven right many times but some things his equations predicted have yet to be shown to be science and yet remain part of the popular consciousness about science.

Like a "singularity", where the laws of physics cease to apply, at the heart of black holes.

Though Karl Schwarzschild found an exact solution to Einstein's 1915 general relativity equations, which implied the existence of extreme objects now known as black holes, mass so concentrated that nothing — not even light — can escape their gravitational pull (thus "black"), the physics community remain unconvinced. For over 100 years many even found it problematic.

Maybe singularities are just math in some cases. Math is a language, languages can tell stories.

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An old saying goes that 'character is what you are in the dark', which is a way of stating that how you'd behave if no one was there to see you is really who you are outside the world of surveys.

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You can't really be friends with a gorilla, but it's still easier than beating one in a fight, even if you are the 100th person trying. They are all really tough whereas an alarming number of human males buy organic beard cream but one thing they share in common is that some are more social and some are less.

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Americans like to be outraged by things, in 2025 the right is outraged by seed oils while the left is outraged about lack of capitalism, but older civilizations wanted people to stay calm.

When we think of the Andes today, we may think of the Incas, but they were colonizers just like Spain. Some 2,000 years before the Inca the Chavín had extensive farms and art and architecture throughout what Europeans later named Peru. And they did it with a lot less violence than most other prehistorical cultures on the continent.(1)

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For the third time in 9 years I am visiting San Pedro de Atacama, a jewel in the middle of nowhere in northern Chile. The Atacama desert is a stretch of extremely dry land at high altitude, which makes it exceptionally attractive for astronomical activities. In its whereabouts, e.g., are some of the largest telescopes in the world - the Cerro Paranal Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the planned Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) now being built in Cerro Armazones. And I have news that an even larger telescope, tentatively dubbed RLT for Ridiculously Large Telescope, is being planned in the region...

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An ancient legal principle has become a key strategy of American children seeking to reduce the effects of climate change in the 21st century. A defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2025 has not stopped the effort, which has several legal actions continuing in the courts.

The legal basis for these cases is called the “public trust doctrine,” the principle that certain natural resources – historically, navigable waters such as lakes, rivers and streams and the lands under them – must be maintained in government ownership and held in trust for present and future generations of the public.

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A new study describes a new liquid phase in thin films of a glass-forming molecules. These results demonstrate how these glasses and other similar materials can be fabricated to be denser and more stable, providing a framework for developing new applications and devices through better design.

New research has identified potential treatment that could improve the human immune system's ability to search out and destroy cancer cells within the body. Scientists have identified a way to restrict the activity of a group of cells which regulate the immune system, which in turn can unleash other immune cells to attack tumours in cancer patients.

University of Washington scientists have developed a statistical framework that incorporates key COVID-19 data -- such as case counts and deaths due to COVID-19 -- to model the true prevalence of this disease in the United States and individual states. Their approach projects that in the U.S. as many as 60% of COVID-19 cases went undetected as of March 7, 2021, the last date for which the dataset they employed is available.

Mice exposed to the opioid oxycodone before birth experience permanent changes in behavior and gene expression. The new research published in eNeuro highlights a need to develop safer types of painkillers for pregnant women.

Researchers have identified a rare class of genetic differences transmitted from parents without autism to their affected children with autism and determined that they are most prominent in "multiplex" families with more than one family member on the spectrum. These findings are reported in Recent ultra-rare inherited variants implicate new autism candidate risk genes, a new study published in Nature Genetics.